As a marketer, you’re probably well aware of the importance of driving traffic to your website. After all, it’s one of the most effective ways to generate new leads for your sales team. Here’s the problem: As you begin to generate more traffic, you completely forget about your existing on-page elements, such as headlines, copy, calls to action, forms, and design, all of which can also increase traffic and hopefully improve conversions.

That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play.

Before we dive into how you can use CRO to your advantage, let’s quickly talk about what CRO is, why it’s beneficial, and how you can get started.

What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimization is the process of collecting and using your users’ feedback and data to finetune your website, as well as your marketing efforts, in order to provide users with the best experience possible. With this information, you can optimize your entire website, including your homepage, landing pages, pricing page, and blog posts, so you can increase the rate at which they complete your desired action, which should lead to those higher conversions you’ve been wanting.

Why take advantage of CRO?

Now that we’ve gone over the what, it’s time to explain the why.

For starters, the information you collect while implementing a CRO strategy will assist you in discovering any elements on your site that visitors could find confusing or that haven’t been resulting in the desired outcomes. As a result, these elements could be preventing your visitors from completing tasks like signing up for your email newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading an offer.

Additionally, CRO provides the opportunity to get a better return on the money you spent in content creation or on a PPC campaign, while at the same time ensuring your future investments in traffic growth are set up for success from the get-go.

Getting started: Is CRO right for your business?

If you’re driving traffic to your website and converting leads, then your business should start considering CRO.

When getting started with CRO, first put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Understand what you’re selling by actually purchasing your product or service and using it so you can determine its benefits and spot any flaws.

After that, you should:

Set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics.

Generate heatmaps of your site to see where visitors are clicking the most.

After gathering this information, it’s time to develop solutions by creating a list of any objections or issues you’ve discovered, and brainstorming ways to overcome usability issues.

Next up, you need to develop variations and take screenshots so you can start analyzing the data you’ve collected. For example, if you noticed a landing page with testimonials generated more conversions than one without them, then you could start adding more testimonials.

CRO strategies worth trying

There are a number of CRO techniques you can test to get your prospects moving through the funnel.

Create text-based CTAs within your blog posts

Website visitors have become accustomed to ignoring banner-like info at the bottom of your web page. That’s now an instance where you can use text-based CTAs in your blog posts to your advantage. Typically, this is simply a standalone line of text that links to a landing page. It’s usually styled as an H3 or an H4 so it’s strategically placed throughout blog posts.

Include pop-ups on your blog

Another test you could run on your blog posts is the inclusion of high-converting pop-ups, such as a slide-in box, drop-down banner, or opt-in box. The objective is to grab the attention of your visitors and offer them value. Instead of just placing these pop-ups on your homepage or landing page, you can also try including them within your blog posts.

Test your landing pages

Your landing page is where a visitor becomes a lead. Run A/B tests so you can get the most out of your landing pages. This can be done painlessly by testing your website’s copy, content offers, images, form questions, and even the design of your page.

Help new leads immediately become marketing-qualified leads.

Build workflows

Thanks to the power of marketing automation, you can “schedule a comprehensive campaign, move prospects through the marketing funnel, use data to send customers the information they want, and make the appropriate adjustments to your campaign in real time.”

The result? You can boost both leads and conversions because marketing automation enables your sales team.

Add messages to high-converting web pages

With messaging tools, you can now chat with your website visitors in real time. How does this improve conversions? You can use these tools to answer any questions your leads may have while they’re on your high-performing web pages, such as pricing or product pages. This should influence your leads to convert as opposed to leave.

Technology has also made it possible for chatting to be more action-based. For example, if there’s a visitor who has been on a product page or blog post for more than a minute, you can automatically offer to answer any questions or concerns he or she may have.

Optimize high-performing blogs

Do you have a blog post that has high amounts of traffic but low conversion rates? Then revisit that blog post and make sure the content offer is aligned with the content of the blog post. Additionally, update the blog post to make it more relevant and timely, and compose a stronger and clearer CTA.

Retargeting

Finally, don’t forget to re-engage those visitors who left your website without taking the action you wanted them to. That’s when you can harness the power of retargeting.

Retargeting follows your website’s visitors by displaying them online ads whenever they visit other websites. For retargeting to be effective, however, you still have to create well-crafted copy, an engaging image, and a can’t-beat offer.

Conclusion

Conversion rate optimization may seem overwhelming if you’re new to the game. The fact of the matter is that it’s about simply discovering why visitors aren’t converting and fixing it. That’s all.

The hardest part is getting started. To help jumpstart into CRO, you could use something like the PIE framework.

In a nutshell, this framework is composed of three criteria that help prioritize which pages to test and in what order. The criteria are potential, importance, and ease.

Once you’ve used this framework, you can more easily get started with CRO.

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